Wednesday, March 31, 2004

Tuesday, March 30, 2004

AOL is raffling off a spammer's Porsche, which it won in a court settlement.

Seizure of property is becoming a major tactic in these lawsuits, since guilty spammers often protest their inability to pay large fines... The Porsche-owning spammer, whose identity remains confidential, was one of a group sued last year for having sent 1 billion junk messages to AOL members...

Thursday, March 25, 2004

ThisisLondon: "The world of pedigree mice has been rocked by scandal.
But officials at the National Mouse Club were today staying silent over reports of an incident in which one member was allegedly punched and his prize-winning rodent strangled. "

What with all the zombies here today, i figured it was a good idea to point out that the copyright on Night of the Living Dead has lapsed, and now the whole danged blasted movie is available for free on archive.org. Man, Archive rules.

UPDATE: Travis, a member of the BoingBoing tribe on Tribe.net, says: " Before 1978, any copyrighted work had to have a copyright notice on every distribution, otherwise it wasn't considered copyrighted. George A. Romero mistakenly left out the copyright notice when he distributed his 1968 film NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. The copyright has not recently "lapsed," but was in fact never enforcable, which is why we have dozens of "pirate" distributions of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and innumerable knock-offs."

Tuesday, March 23, 2004

Looking for something else, I stumbled on this interesting report on the Bangladeshi restaurant trade in London: The restaurant business in Tower Hamlets (and elsewhere), in contrast to the garment industry, has been very much a growth sector. The 'Indian'...

Telegraph | Opinion | We tried appeasement once before...: "A neighbour of mine refuses to let her boy play with 'militaristic' toys. So when a friend gave the l'il tyke a plastic sword and shield, mom mulled it over and then took away the former and allowed him to keep the latter. And for a while, on my drive down to town, I'd pass Junior in the yard playing with his shield, mastering the art of cowering more effectively against unseen blows."

The Socratic Shrink: "Americans are tired of psychologists dwelling on our every painful feeling, we're sick of psychiatrists prescribing a new drug every time we feel confused and many of our most pressing problems aren't even emotional or chemical to begin with -- they're philosophical. To wit: You don't have to be clinically depressed or burdened by childhood guilt to want help with the timeless questions of the human condition -- the persistence of suffering and the inevitability of death, the need for a reliable ethics"

spiked-essays | Essay | The politics of the lonely crowd: "The other day my eight-year-old son came home, took off his jacket and announced 'Daddy, I really hate Bush!' Until that point, this child had strong views on the subject of football (which he loves), school dinners (which he dislikes) and mobile phones (which he desperately desires). But this was his first statement of political preference. Why did he feel so strongly about the American president? 'Because he's so stupid', my son replied.

As a proud father, I would like to boast that my young son and his classmates have developed a precocious interest in political affairs. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Children are no more curious about political life than their elders. Rather, political life in the Western world has become so infantilised that even eight-year-olds can share its brilliant insights."

This weekend: "DARPA intends to conduct a challenge of autonomous ground vehicles between Los Angeles and Las Vegas in March of 2004. A cash award of $1 million will be granted to the team that fields the first vehicle to complete the designated route within a specified time limit. The purpose of the challenge is to leverage American ingenuity to accelerate the development of autonomous vehicle technologies that can be applied to military requirements. Many of the details of the event are being developed, and new information will be posted to this web site as soon as possible."

Chad Dickerson: March 09, 2004 Archives: Infoworld says: "Ever since we began publishing RSS feeds at InfoWorld, the requests for our home page had always exceeded requests for our Top News RSS feed. Not any more. Over the past several weeks, requests for InfoWorld's Top News RSS feed have regularly exceeded the requests for our home page. This has been going on long enough now that we're certain that it's permanent. I think it's a big deal."

Tuesday, March 09, 2004

Telegraph | Arts | The magic of Morrissey - the fan who became a star: "Morrissey was a lovelorn fan of Oscar Wilde and James Dean, Elsie Tanner and the New York Dolls, and he appears to have made something of an art out of moping around the house in a melancholy, jobless, big-cardiganed way, dreaming of a wonderful romance involving himself and every image he ever cared about, dispensing epigrams over the bannister while his mother got busy with the Findus Crispy Pancakes. "

The Registerthe Departmental Interface Server (DIS), an off-the-peg package developed by Sun Microsystems and Software AG. DIS was developed over the last two years, in collaboration with the office of the e-envoy and was given governmental approval in October last year.

Friday, March 05, 2004

spectator.co.uk: "There have been widespread calls for Mel Gibson?s The Passion of The Christ to be banned, or at least boycotted. He has been accused of glorying in gore, of pandering to sadomasochism, of turning the Gospel story into an anti-Semitic snuff movie. All these criticisms lead to one conclusion: that the critics have not read the Gospels. "

Thursday, March 04, 2004

The Shi'ite Factor in Gulf Politics: "The Shi'ite / Sunni conflict underlies Gulf politics.
Saddam Hussein's regime tried to show a pan-Arabic face to the world. In Iraq, that ideology meant Sunni dominance over the Shi'a. The Shi'a saw Saddam's pan-Arabism as an attack on their version of Islam.
The discourse in the Gulf is full of coded speech that masks the depth of this Sunni / Shi'ite conflict from those that miss the coding. Arabic language websites demonstrate the virulent nature of the conflict.
One Sunni extremist, affiliated with Al Qaeda, wrote a pamphlet listing the threats to Sunni Islam. He identified four threats of equal danger.

1. Jews
2. Christian Crusaders (the United States and Great Britain)
3. Secularists
4. The Shi'ite heretic threat
The Sunni extremists call Shi'ites refusers � they refuse to accept the successors to the prophet. The word 'refusers' is a slur, akin to a racial epithet. "

Jon's Radio: "By the way, have you ever wondered what happens if you point a VNC viewer on one box (say, a Mac) at another box (say, Windows), then launch a VNC viewer on the second box and point it back at the first? Here's what"

Psycho Studio - Edit your own Shower Scene!: "Endlessly imitated, the stabbing of Marion Crane in Alfred Hitchcock's 'Psycho' has become indelibly stamped on the American Psyche. The 48 second sequence has been studied by thousands of film students of the years, but only now can you cut your own version using the original footage, all online. Storyboarded by Saul Bass and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, the original scene was edited by George Tomasini together with Hitchcock. See what you can do and if it compares with the original!"

ThisisLondonPolice investigating the deaths of soldiers at Deepcut barracks will severely criticise the Army today over their handling of the investigations, and the care of young recruits. The report by Surrey police is expected to recommend changes to improve care and reduce the risks to young soldiers.

Melanie Phillips's Diary: Jacobin-lite: "They don't have the courage to espouse an avowedly republican agenda. Instead, we're getting republicanism by stealth, or institutional Jacobinism -- a kind of pathological reflex action to do away with 1000 years of history, in their continuing and desperate attempt to give themselves an ideology of 'modernity' -- simply for want of any better ideas." Melanie Phillips on Blair's government in the light of Blunket's faux pas wrt the Crown Prosecution Service.

HOLLYWOOD, CA�After watching Mel Gibson's The Passion Of The Christ Monday, Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ announced that He will demand creative control over the next film based on His life.The Onion

The table is full, the wall is painted, the space is filled with voices!' Zurab was talking. We were in a Mexican-Japanese restaurant in Tbilisi, ending a heavy night. Bottles and dishes crowded the table; the diners were even gaudier than the d�cor; over the blast of the band came the voice of Georgia's richest brewer yelling at his bodyguards. 'I'm talking about Georgia,' Zurab shouted. God, not more Kakheti red wine?

eBay and Microsoft today invited third-party developers to tap into the Web services capabilities of both the eBay platform and the Microsoft Office System to enhance trading on eBay. With the combined power of the two platforms, developers now have the opportunity to build solutions that can benefit buyers and sellers on eBay.

Tuesday, March 02, 2004

The most important American of our time is John Wayne,' critic Eric Bentley once declared. Did Stalin agree? A new biography makes the surprising assertion that Wayne was the subject of repeated assassination attempts by Soviet agents as well as Chinese and American Communists.The Village Voice:

The BBC on the background to the scam that lies behind the propositions that keep clogging my inbox. Its amazing to me that anyone falls for them at all, but apparently they do and for extraordinary amounts of money.

When he was still a student, Richard Feynman hinted at a career to come as a scientific wonderer when he wrote: "I wonder why. I wonder why. / I wonder why I wonder / I wonder why I wonder why / I wonder why I wonder!" Such wondering, and meta-wondering, takes us to the heart of what geneticist-cum-neuroscientist Francis Crick (who would know) calls "the major unsolved problem in biology"--explaining how billions of neurons swapping chemicals give rise to such subjective experiences as consciousness, self-awareness, and awareness that others are conscious and self-aware.Scientific American